In first grade we got a math book that was just problem sheets with a brief destruction page for each and so I went home and finished it. The next day I was suspended from school because it was a years worth of material. This was after the preschool incident where I was told to eat my snack of graham crackers but I have celiac disease, I refused and the teacher tried to make my by being forceful and punishing me so I called him a stupid asshole and was suspended for a week while the teacher got an apology.

There are a couple of things going on there. First of all, schools are really designed to teach kids en masse. If you had to teach ONE kid, you'd never set that kid up as we do, where a kid sits down and a teacher talks to them from the front of a room and, after that, gives the student a few minutes of individual attention. The classroom format is designed to maximize the amount of the teacher's time spent teaching while trying to maximize the aggregate learning of the class. But, that means that, for any particular kid, there's a fair bit of the class time when they're not learning at all or learning slower than they are capable of.

You can offset that, some, with differentiated instruction where you put the "smart" kids together -- there, the teacher can go at a faster pace, can provide more challenging work, and so on. But, it still has the same fundamental flaw -- you're optimizing for use of the teacher's time, not the student's.

The other thing is that schools, especially public schools, are bureaucracies that tend to be driven by centralized policy, not by individual decision making at that staff level. Part of that is necessity, but part of it is because administrators don't trust student-facing staff to make good decisions and are also hyper-concerned with liability when student X gets to do something when student Y doesn't. If X and Y are of different races, then there will be a claim that Y was denied BECAUSE of his/her race, even if the decision ultimately made sense for both X and Y.

Sorry you had a bad experience with school. Too many schools are underfunded and too many teachers are overwhelmed with large class sizes, behavioral and disciplinary challenges, lack of administrative support and in-class assistance, and disinterested, unhelpful parents (who are working 2-3 jobs, often at night, and are themselves exhausted and burned out).

For most people the solution will not be "more homeschooling," because that is a pipe dream for most who are struggling to get by. The solution is a m

I'd be curious for an unbiased opinion of your child's social adjustment.

Every time I've encountered home schooled children they were either developmentally challenged, perhaps autistic, or they were mentally OK by stuck in a socially maladjusted bubble. I perceive both scenarios as rather sad and feel that the children suffer long term social/psycological issues because of it.

That's the inherent problem with classes, you have to teach 30+ students the same but they're not all capable of learning at the same pace or in the same way.

Kids who can't keep up fall behind, while those that are faster get bored and start to misbehave so they get labelled as troublemakers.

You also have the peer pressure from other kids, who will mock or even bully the top and bottom percentages of the class respectively, discouraging them from participating.

Catering to each child and teaching them at the

Time will tell, for sure. But I will say this, homeschool vs. public school today is a completely different animal than when I was a kid. If you would have asked 30 years ago me, I'd likely have agreed with you. Today me, with this being our lives now? Let's just say I have a much different perspective. I think the negative connotation we formed from the early homeschool or private school environments aren't as prevalent perhaps.

One of the biggest concerns was about socialization. For my daughter it wasn't

> I'm not in the homeschooling universe, but I have yet to meet a second-generation homeschooler. Like, anyone I know who was homeschooled sends -their- kids to school (public, private, parochial, boarding, single-sex, co-ed) - anything but homeschool. Thoughts?

I know a few. I don't know what it may or may not mean. It may be relevant that the ones I know used a community-based approach, where groups of homeschooling families worked together to create something akin to a school, with different parents teaching different subjects. This meant that while the kids socialization groups were small, they did hang out with and learn with other kids, not just their siblings.

I'm first-generation and my kids are second-generation. One big factor is the time commitment and financial commitment. You're still paying property taxes and then education expenses on top of that. You're essentially dedicating one parent to be a teacher and stay at home without pay, thus becoming a single-income household. Not everyone wants to teach their kids. I would say there is some dependency on whether you were homeschooled yourself, but there are many additional factors outside that which affect d

I'll counter your anecdote with my own. I know quite a few homeschooled kids who are now adults who are homeschooling their own children.

Religious motivations aside, those children can all read, write, and perform basic mathematics far above equivalent public school levels. Their grasp of basic science is pretty good, too, at least when it doesn't conflict with religious beliefs. And every one of them plays some sort of musical instrument, and is active in sports.

I was once a homeschooling skeptic myself

Just FYI, on the 2022 PISA assessment, U.S. students outperformed their peers in New Zealand, Hong Kong, Australia, UK, Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland, Italy, Germany, Austria, Belgium, Norway, France and the Netherlands on the reading exam. On the science exam, the U.S. outperformed Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Norway and Italy. Ont he math exam, the U.S. was more or less last among wealthy countries. It's really only math where the U.S. system fails miserably.

I hear the complaint of not enough money all the time, and that somehow throwing more money at it will magically fix the problem. What I would suggest is to actually look where that money goes. It goes to a bloated administration that continue to suck up all of the resources, and not to the teachers on the ground. Further, that massive administration also micro manages the teachers who are now so constrained on what they can do, and you have parents who demand every single child is put on an 'Individuali

I don't think unreasonable to be complaining. Here is an article from npr, [1]https://www.tpr.org/education/... [tpr.org] that shows current funding levels of around 12K/student. X20 students in a class and voila 240 grand for an average class for a full day. Teachers get around 60K, where exactly is the other 180 grand going? 3X for overhead seems a bit steep.

[1] https://www.tpr.org/education/2025-05-13/fact-checking-gov-abbotts-claim-that-public-schools-have-an-all-time-high-of-15k-per-student

Throwing money at schools has not fixed the problem. If anything, schools have gotten worse.

Don't mistake the recognition that the system is broken and needs to be fixed for a desire to "dismantle education". I want a strong and effective public education system. We do not have one. What we have is garbage. We should try other approaches while also undoing changes that have made things worse. "Social promotion", for example, is a failure. We need to return to holding kids back when they fail a grad

I'm happy to pay taxes for a public education system that works . Unfortunately, what we have today is a system encumbered by too many administrators, hampered by unfunded mandates, exploited by public unions, and micromanaged from every level from (superfluous) department heads to district administration to state legislators to the federal government.

From 2010-2019, the number of administrators in public schools nearly doubled, while the number of students and teachers only went up by ~8%. Those admini

I'd like to offer a counterpoint. The whole "socialization" argument is one of those urban myths that has long outlived any relationship with reality. In our local elementary school, the kids get a single recess per day. When they arrive for school in the morning, they are expected to sit silently in the hallway outside their classroom until the teacher lets them in. Their lunch period is so short that there's barely enough time to down their lunch, let alone talk with their peers.

My kids are homesch

Showing the children how to run the family farm is exploitation?

What the fuck are you on about.

I rather liked driving the tractor once I was old enough to reach the pedals. Taking care of the chickens did me no harm at all. There was still time for running around the countryside.

I think you're largely demanding things that already exist.

You're kidding yourself if you think the authoritarian hell of schools has some positive moral lesson to impart. I learned how to get away with shit and that the average person is a complete moron.

There appears to be an implicit assumption in your post that public school is the only way for kids to develop a sense of civic engagement, social skills, new friendships, independence, meeting people from all social strata.

Certainly, a public school *can* be such an environment. However, over the past few decades, I've watched public schools (at least in the US) devolve into an environment where independence is quashed, left-leaning (or outright far-left) values are taught as doctrine, and students are g

You've swapped the side-benefit for the purpose. Schools are for education. Socialization is a side-benefit achievable in other ways. Education can only be achieved at home or at school.

Part of the problem in the US is the very idea you presented - that school is for something other than education. It is not. It must not be, because then there is only one remaining avenue for providing education. The home. Those mistaken beliefs about the purpose of a school are the reason homeschooling is on the